Day 3 of The Throne Wars.
Raven accepted the quest without reading it at first. His thumb hovered over the interface out of habit.
[Daily Objective: Deploy 3 Siege Devices.]
"The Cindraleth Union requires imdiate reinforcent. Secure flanks. Fortify choke points."
He exhaled. "At least they stopped asking to collect corpses."
Raven took it anyway. He hadn’t gotten the chance to finish yesterday’s quest—too much chaos, too much blood. No one was collecting anything in that ss.
The Inner Sanctum’s blue light dimd behind him as he stepped into the middle district.
Raven moved through the streets slowly, weaving past collapsed pillars and scorched barricades. The deeper into the Middle District he went—closer to the forr breach—the more wreckage he found.
Burned-out carriages littered the alleys. Repair nodes buzzed weakly on broken walls. Shattered totems and ruined supply crates spilled over walkways still sticky with old blood.
This had been the last fallback yesterday. Now, it had been patched up—but the mory of the collapse still clung to the stones.
Raven vaulted onto a hanging scaffold, climbed a fractured terrace, and pulled himself onto the rooftop.
From there, he finally paused. Watched.
The formation below had already begun to take shape.
The difference was imdiate.
Where yesterday’s streets had been smoke and fla, today they were quiet and cleaned. Repair nodes shimred on barricades. NPCs stood idle by fixed platforms. Players moved in clusters, checking maps, coordinating formations, prepping gear.
The ss in Middle Area, the inner city of the hold, was pushed back overnight.
More importantly—more players were online. The chat was active again. Guild nas he hadn’t seen yesterday started appearing. Rankers, zerg leads, sponsored players.
And there—right in zone chat—was one na he recognized.
[EC] Lymira: "All ranged and midline units rotate left. We’re pushing the west flank before they regroup. This is our montum window."
Raven narrowed his eyes.
Lymira. Guild leader of the Ebonreach Covenant—a newly promoted strear boosted by Stormveil, funded, branded, and built for visibility. A White Mansion dia darling. A corporate face with battlefield teeth. Rumor had it her real-world connections were just as curated as her guild banners.
Raven had seen her before—back in Emberstone Burrow. Not because of her brilliance, but because he wiped her guild, and afterward, a complaint mysteriously appeared. That complaint helped trigger Patch v1.3—the sa patch that broke summon AI and rewrote half the boss behavior in the system.
Who forgets a player like that?
The giant main gate had been breached. ridian Fold artillery still hamred the right flank.
Nearly 500 players crowded the district—guild banners fluttering from rooftops, personal mounts shifting in idle loops. Siege engineers were restocking ammo crates. Paladins adjusted stances beside shimring totems.
The chaos of yesterday had burned itself out. What replaced it wasn’t silence—it was anticipation.
Steam floated from fire glyphs warming the stair ledges. Summoners prepped their scrolls or sieges. Strears drifted past, drone cams circling them like familiars. A few high-ranked healers stood in gleaming robes at overlook points, healing the injured players.
Then ca the thunder.
A roar tore through the Hold, shaking loose dust from the upper walls. The right-side rampart exploded, sending a plu of smoke and debris curling skyward. Broken stone rained across the district.
For a mont, all commands died.
Then the zone shifted. Naturally. Instinctively.
[System Notice: South-West Wall integrity has been breached.]
Players surged toward the breach to the right, responding to the new threat—where the Fold had broken through again. It wasn’t organized. It wasn’t clean.
But it was imdiate.
The Hold’s defenders were already moving before anyone told them to.
The zone hadn’t received a direct command yet—but it was already moving.
Right side flanks saw their numbers grow. A guild ping blinked toward a Fold skirmish marker.
Players were repositioning—not because of orders, but because of rhythm.
They knew when the next push would co. They could feel it.
Then Lymira’s voice ca through chat.
She’d been barking formations to go through the gate and face the Fold soldier’s head on to further pushed them back.
But this ti... sothing was off.
He tabbed through the map. Fold skirmish reports were already ticking up on the right flank. Movent had started thirty seconds ago. Players were already rotating.
She’s calling left after the zone has gone right.
The orders went out anyway.
Players hesitated. So peeled left. Others froze. The midline fractured. Formations misaligned.
And then—it happened.
From the cracked main gate ca the storm—a coordinated burst of death.
Fold mages and archers, already staged just beyond the breach, opened fire.
Arrows rained. AOE sigils blood. Firewalls ignited in a perfect arc.
The first to fall was a paladin nad Drelan, who had already begun to rotate right. His healer—Kessra—was still on the backline to the left, tapping her skill list when the burst hit. The healing beam fizzled as a fla lance exploded between them.
"Hold on, I’ve got you—" was all Kessra managed before her screen went black.
A pair of summoners, Halric and Fen, near the siege line tried to reposition. Their casting circles glowed, then glitched—a flicker, a pulse, nothing. The patch still hadn’t been fixed. No monsters ca. No errors. Just silence.
They kept trying anyway. Again. Again.
"Co on... co on... just once," Halric whispered.
The third attempt never finished. A barrage of soul-splitting arrows slamd into them both before their summons could form.
A guild’s entire vanguard—thirty-one players strong from the guild TundraWolves—charged left into the signal. Their raid lead, a warrior nad Grev, shouted, "Push now! We’ll break their flank!"
They never got the chance.
A wall of light and fla tore them apart. Their spells never landed. Their bodies left no mark.
A rogue nad Thernis hesitated, one foot forward, one still back. His job was to slip through chaos, not stand in it.
But he froze.
He wasn’t sure whether to follow the push left, or regroup right. So he stayed put for a fracture of seconds.
And that was his mistake. A rogue’s mistake.
Then ca the frost.
An ice mage from the Fold launched a wide freeze glyph into the stuttering frontline. Thernis was caught dead-center. The spell snapped across his boots and legs, freezing him to the stone in perfect silence.
Then the zerg behind him charged.
They didn’t see him. They didn’t stop.
He shattered under their feet—frozen solid and ground to pieces in the rush of blind obedience to a broken call.
100 to 200 players were shredded in under twenty seconds.
Their bodies hit the stone in waves—half-cast spells still glowing in the air. Death logs flooded the system.
Strears caught it live.
Their feeds lit up with onscreen overlays and real-ti chat:
"Who’s leading this? Lymira?"
"Broooo she just killed her whole push lolol"
"This is a clip. Holy shit I’m definitely posting this lmao"
The zone map flickered. A new alert appeared.
As if on cue, the Fold launched a follow-up push.
Mounted elites erupted from the breach, hooves pounding like war drums. They swept past the crumbling frontline and stord straight into the backline, where mages and archers were still exposed. The tanks and lee had already moved right—leaving the soft core wide open.
Lightning burst through ward glyphs. Fire lances shredded glass-armored casters. Archers scread as sabers tore through their unguarded ranks.
One healer tried to blink away but got skewered mid-cast. A battle bard was silenced before their first note. A squad of support priests went down in synchronized deaths, animation-locked in a prayer that never reached the system.
The skirmishers followed close—cloaked, brutal, efficient—finishing what the cavalry started.
A third of the zone was too stunned to react in ti.
It wasn’t just failure. It was a public collapse—broadcast to half the server in real-ti.
"She sent them into a kill box," Raven muttered.
Raven watched the chat scroll.
It wasn’t that her strategy was bad.
It was that the tempo was off. The zone had already moved.
And when you give the right order at the wrong ti... you don’t lead.
You bait a massacre.
[Zone Chat]
"WTF was that call?!"
"They funneled us straight into Fold fire."
"We were already rotating right. What even was that?"
"200 dead from a late ping."
"GG, zone wiped."
[EC] Lymira: "Montum was lost because no one COMMITTED. You hesitated, not ."
The chat didn’t slow. It turned.
"Maybe because you split the zone mid-push."
"Why are we even listening to her anymore?"
"My whole squad just got fard."
Lymira lost her cool.
"Then maybe if summoners, tars, and necromancers weren’t such a deadweight right now, we’d still have pressure!"
That did it. The mont the words hit the chat log, it fractured.
Those were the backbone of the backline—support and crowd control. And she had just called them useless.
Ranged players stopped casting. Healers stopped replying. The lee lines began buckling without their rhythm.
She hadn’t just failed the call. She alienated the only players still trying to recover it.
Raven smirked. Another seed had blood—this one planted by the fake hero herself.
Then—
The horn blew.
Not the Cindraleth call.
Deeper. tallic. Grinding.
Raven’s head turned before the others even flinched.
"Siege Breaker," he whispered. "Third day. Of course they’re sending it now."
From the far end of the horizon, sothing massive moved.
The ridian Fold wasn’t done.
The best of Throne Wars is about to co.
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